Introducing negotiable fares and an elevated look, built to stand out among giants.

Role
Design Leadership

Scope
Product Strategy
UI Design
Interaction Design
Visual Design
Motion Direction
Design System
Brand Identity

Platform
Mobile

Timeline
6 months

Overview

Heetch is a ride-hailing app operating across Europe and Africa, serving 3 million passengers and 180,000 drivers in its strongest year. As the business looked to differentiate further against better-funded competitors, we set out to redefine the marketplace itself, moving from fixed fares to an auction-style pricing: passengers and drivers each name a price, and the app matches them.

As part of this shift, I defined a new design direction built for our core audience: 18-30 year olds in urban nightlife scenes. I led a ground-up rebuild of Heetch's visual foundations, launched the new auction-style pricing feature, then scaled that vision across product, growth, and brand company-wide.

Challenge

Our identity was fractured: product and marketing told two different visual stories, and neither reflected the brand or the audience we served. Pricing looked functionally identical to Uber and Bolt on the surface, and users perceived the app itself as incomplete or unreliable. We needed to elevate the experience to build credibility and shift perception from an early-stage startup to an established, trustworthy business.

Approach

Over 70% of rides touch the Paris suburbs, where the need has always been simple: a safe ride home at night, when public transport stops and taxis won't go. Drawing on that data, I defined a vision for a premium, night-focused design language called "After Dark", got the org behind it, then rolled it out to our apps and beyond into growth, product marketing, internal comms, and brand guidelines.

I translated this new identity into the product, across passenger and driver apps on both iOS and Android: shipping dark mode as the new primary theme, adding new Lottie animations, and reworking our core design tokens, including a new primary color unified across brand and product, tuned for accessibility across both themes. The system had to hold across five languages, including right-to-left Arabic. To keep engineering and design moving at the same pace, the Design System Manager on my team built a native sandbox for real-time design QA and exploration. All the while, we also shipped new flows for the auction-style feature across both apps.

Manifesto

Heetch gets darker not to fade, but to reveal. A glow to guide you home.

Recognition

"Our app is cool again"

Co-Founder & CPO, Heetch

Impact

+17% passenger rides within 30 days of shipping the auction-style pricing feature end to end across both apps.

Zero external agency costs through an in-house asset creation pipeline with Midjourney and Lottie.

Cut design-to-dev friction by pairing our custom sandbox app with async alignment on Linear.

Distinct + consistent visual identity deployed across product and marketing, sparking user enthusiasm.

Delivered fast, under a tight launch window, without cutting craft.